Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

black slavery. Her earliest ambition was to become a lawyer,

but education was denied her by her outraged father who

wanted her only to dance, flirt, and marry. “With me learning

was a passion, ” she wrote later. “My nature [was] denied her

appropriate nutriment, her course counteracted, her aspirations crushed. ”4 In her adolescence, Sarah conscientiously defled the Southern law that prohibited teaching slaves to

read. She gave reading lessons in the slave Sunday school until

she was discovered by her father; and even after that, she

continued to tutor her own maid. “The light was put out, ” she

wrote, “the keyhole screened, and flat on our stomachs, before

the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the

laws of South Carolina. ”5 Eventually, this too was discovered,

and understanding that the maid would be whipped for further

infractions, Sarah ended the reading lessons.

In 1821, Sarah left the South and went to Philadelphia. She

renounced her family’s Episcopal religion and became a

Quaker.

Angelina, too, could not tolerate black slavery. In 1829, at

the age of twenty-four, she wrote in her diary: “That system

must be radically wrong which can only be supported by

transgressing the laws of God. ”6 In 1828, she too moved to

Philadelphia.

In 1835, Angelina wrote a personal letter to William Lloyd

Garrison, the militant abolitionist. She wrote: “The ground

upon which you stand is holy ground: never—never surrender

it. If you surrender it, the hope of the slave is extinguished.. . .

[I]t is my deep, solemn deliberate conviction, that this is a

cause worth dying for. ”7 Garrison published the letter in his

abolitionist paper, The Liberator, with a foreword identifying

Angelina as the member of a prominent slaveholding family.

She was widely condemned by friends and acquaintances for

disgracing her family, and Sarah, too, condemned her.

In 1836, she sealed her fate as a traitor to her race and to

her family by publishing an abolitionist tract called “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. ” For the first time, maybe in the history of the world, a woman addressed other

women and demanded that they unite as a revolutionary force

to overthrow a system of tyranny. And for the first time on

Amerikan soil, a woman demanded that white women identify

themselves with the welfare, freedom, and dignity of black

women:

Let [women] embody themselves in societies, and send petitions

up to their different legislatures, entreating their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, to abolish the institution of slavery; no longer to subject woman to the scourge and the chain, to mental

darkness and moral degradation; no longer to tear husbands from

their wives, and children from their parents; no longer to make

men, women, and children, work without wages; no longer to

make their lives bitter in hard bondage; no longer to reduce

American citizens to the abject condition of slaves, of “chattels